Amazing visuals, and if all that was done with just actors (and a few props) in front of a blue screen, I’m duly impressed. The lighting of the backgrounds combined with the lighting on the characters almost made this seem animated, Final Fantasy style, though with a huge upgrade to the realism with which the characters moved, because they were, of course, real actors. I had to remind myself of that fact, now and then. The visual quality of this movie is like raytracing… The raytraced scenes at IRTC (Internet Ray Tracing Competition) convey the same feeling.

Technical achievement that Sky Captain was, I hard time sitting still through through it. Maybe because I had just finished digesting my lunch and getting through an associated food coma stage, thereby arriving at the energetic stage, and needed to be doing something other than sitting still in a theater, although mental stimulation (which the movie didn’t provide) would possibly have worked. The characters spoke too slowly and there wasn’t any truly witty or interesting dialog, for example. Jude Law’s character was all right (when he wasn’t talking), but everyone else was annoying, particularly the reporter / love interest (Gwyneth Paltrow). I kept wanting her to fall into a ditch or out of an airplane or at least do something, anything, to get herself put out of the way. Not that I saw any chemistry between the two, either. The "bad guy" wasn’t particularly scary, and the coolest effect in the movie was one of the "good guys" getting fried/melted into an instant skeleton. Sort of like the guys at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

To sum it up: beautiful effects, but a movie ruined by a comic-book style story (fine, if that’s what the writer/director was going for) too simple for even the simplest comic book and mostly annoying characters who talked too slowly and did silly things like spend 30 seconds just standing there kissing when there were 60 seconds left to impending disaster… Wouldn’t that make you annoyed, too? Oh don’t go trying to tell me that sort of thing is sweet, the world was going to be destroyed! How would you feel if the world were blown up because some people were kissing when they should have been saving it?